ウラル・フィルハーモニー管弦楽団 Ural Philharmonic Orchestra
Ural Philharmonic Orchestra (in Russian 'Уральский академический филармонический оркестр, УАФО') is a professional symphony orchestra based in Yekaterinburg, Russia).
The Ural Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1936 by the famous Russian conductor Mark Paverman as the Orchestra of the Sverdlovsk Radio. The most prominent musicians of the Soviet Union - conductors, soloists and composers - worked with the Orchestra. However, due to the special status of the 'closed city' of Sverdlovsk it was 'hidden' from the rest of the world until 1991 when the city was 'opened', and the Orchestra's high professional level quickly became well known abroad.
Based in Yekaterinburg, a 1,5 million city on the border between Europe and Asia, the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra performs over 100 concerts and more than 70 programs per year, both at its domicile, the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Hall, and on its extensive international tours. Thanks to the Philharmonic’s innovative Digital Concert Hall capacities, the Orchestra’s home concerts are regularly broadcast live on video into the region’s public libraries and cultural centres, where music lovers from the Sverdlovsk region can come together to share the experience.
The orchestra uniting a hundred of musicians and directed by the national celebrity Maestro Dmitry Liss is famous for its intelligence, flexibility and splendid interpretations of classical and contemporary music. It performs around 100 concerts every year. The Ural Philharmonic Orchestra is the main resident orchestra of all the musical festivals of the Sverdlovsk State Philharmonic.
UPO has toured over 20 countries and performed at such venues as the Pleyel, Arsenal, Debussy Hall, Corum Opera Berlioz, Palais des congres de Paris (France), Berlin Philharmonic, Essen Philharmonic (Germany), Konzerthaus, Vienna, Brucknerhaus Linz (Austria), Royal Concertgebouw (the Netherlands), Auditorio de Murcia (Spain), Beethovenhalle (Germany), Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo Metropolitan Theater (Japan), Culture and Congress Center (Switzerland), John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (USA), Tonhalle and Victoria Hall (Switzerland), Queen Elizabeth Hall (Belgium), Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Concert Hall and New Stage of the Mariinsky Theater (Russia), and others.
The Ural Philharmonic Orchestra discography encounters over 30 CDs with the leading record labels. One of the most recent ones, the Russian Light album (Sony Classical) with Olga Peretyatko (soprano) was nominated for the 2018 International Classical Music Awards (ICMA).
Over the years, the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra has worked with many outstanding Russian and foreign musicians, including conductors Dmitry Kitaenko, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Krzysztof Penderecki, Vladimir Fedoseev, Valery Gergiev, Klaus Tennstedt, Jean-Claude Casadesus, Eliahu Inbal, Andrey Boreiko, and the soloists Mstislav Rostropovich, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Nikolai Petrov, Yuri Bashmet, Viktor Tretyakov, Elisso Virsaladze, Natalia Gutman, Mikhail Pletnev, Liana Isakadze, Dmitri Khvorostovsky, Alexander Knyazev, Peter Donohoe, Boris Berezovsky, Vadim Repin, Nikolai Lugansky, Denis Matsuev, Frederic Kempf, Sergey Krylov, Olga Peretyatko, Dmitry Masleev and other classical music celebrities.
The Orchestra participated in numerous international festivals such as the Music Biennale Zagreb, the Beethovenfest Bonn, Ludwigsburg Festival, Bodensee Festival (Germany), the Europalia Russia Festival in Belgium and repeatedly in the Music Festival Crescendo in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Kaliningrad, the Festival International de Piano a la Roque d’Antheron and La Folle Journee in France, Spain and Japan. Maestro Valery Gergiev invited the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra to perform at the opening of the Mariinsky Theatre’s new concert hall in 2007, under his direction. Since then, the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra presents its own season concert series at the Mariinsky Theatre.
Conductors:
Dmitry Liss - Principal Conductor (1995-present)
Enkhe (Enkhbaatar Baatarzhyvan) - conductor of the UPO (1991-present); Principal Conductor of the Ural Youth Philharmonic Orchestra (1998-present)
Aleksey Dorkin (2010-present)